I have several lines of work in progress. Please contact me if you are interested in any of the following projects.

​Labor Politics and Development​

In or Out: political incorporation of labor and democratization pathways in Turkey and Argentina (with Erol Ulker)

This paper unpacks contrasting union density rates in Turkey and Argentina. It asks why Turkish workers have increasingly abandoned unions at alarming rates while their counterparts in Argentina continue to enlist at a time when economic globalization posed comparable threats to their economic well-being. In doing so, it argues that historical processes of the political incorporation of labor plays an important role in worker motivation to stay in unions as active members. While labor in Argentina had access to institutional platforms to voice their demands and negotiate with politicians during the first half of the 20th century thanks to an early political incorporation, their Turkish counterparts were silenced during the same period. There, the incorporation of labor was only temporary, and unions increasingly lost their negotiation power in the aftermath of the 1980s. Consequently, large confederations turned into ineffective societal actors, and could not instigate change. Thus, the evolution of labor movements and political institutions, which unfolded in distinct ways in these two countries, yielded contrasting mobilization patterns by the end of 20th century.

Even though the independence of agencies has become the most controversial aspect in the study of regulatory institutions, it is dubious that this is the only important problem that merits attention. In this paper, we argue that independence has overshadowed the relevance of accountability in understanding how regulatory agencies work, blurring the problems they confront in different political and institutional settings. Increasingly, however, accountability has become a key issue in regulatory governance too, as many problems in successful regulatory action are directly related to the characteristics and strength of accountability procedures and practices. This paper provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of accountability in independent regulatory agencies (IRAs), considering diverse streams of literature, including those related to the measurement of the independence of regulatory agencies and new perspectives in the accountability of political institutions..

The Financial Roots of Climate Change

Much of the research on climate change concurs that anthropogenic factors since the industrial revolution are the key drivers behind surface temperature anomalies, however, the precise human dynamics behind this link remain unclear. In this essay, we reveal that market liberalization policies—which were aggressively promoted by international financial actors during the latter half of the late 20th century—added a new impetus to climate change dynamics. Specifically, a move towards capital account liberalization after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system stands out as an important accelerator of surface temperature increase. Using data from NASA's GISTEMP, CMIP5 models and S&P500 Index, I argue that pressures to boost corporate profits and shareholder value encourages companies to cut a lot of corners in managing their environmental externalities. The accumulated impact of this behavior adds further momentum to global greenhouse gas production and contributes to greater swings in temperature anomalies. These findings highlight the need for a collaborative agenda to unpack how economic liberalization policies and financialization accelerates global greenhouse production.

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